Biz Break: Silicon Valley economic recovery seems complete

Today: Employment and housing prices in Silicon Valley officially reached their top marks since the Great Recession began. Also: Adobe not punished on Wall Street for cloud failure.

The Lead: Job market, housing prices continue strong growth

While the rest of California and many parts of the United States continue to trudge through the long, hard slog back from the Great Recession, Silicon Valley has officially made it back to the strength it showed before the subprime housing crisis caused a steep drop in housing prices and drastic rise in unemployment.

"I don't think it should be a surprise that one of the regions with the nation's strongest economies is the closest to its previous high for home prices," Andrew LePage of Dataquick, a San Diego-based real estate information service, said earlier this week. "San Francisco and Silicon Valley are more than pulling their weight."

The Great Recession officially began in December 2007, when a raft of foreclosures were hitting the housing market and banks were struggling with losses from bonds constructed of housing mortgages. The effects of the recession took a little longer to reach the job market across most industries, with the unemployment rates permanently going above 6 percent in the South Bay and 5 percent in the San Francisco region in June 2008.

California is also regaining much that it lost, but at a slower pace. The statewide unemployment rate dipped lower than 8 percent for the first time since September 2008 in April, thanks to the addition of 56,000 jobs, but Michael Bernick -- a former director of the California EDD and a fellow at the Milken Institute -- said Friday that the growth was not as strong as it may appear.

"It's not the stable, long-term employment," he told the Associated Press. "It's a different type of employment, but it's still counted if you're hired 20 hours a week, if you're hired as a project employee."

Even with Silicon Valley's strong growth, there is reason for optimism that the pace will quicken still. The region's technology industry set sales records in 2013, but job growth at the 150 largest technology companies in the Bay Area declined from 2012 to 2013; with the largest cash reserves in the recorded history of the industry, there are hopes of additional hiring this year.

"We not only think that this will continue, but we believe growth in the Bay Area will get stronger during the second half of 2014," Jordan Levine, director of economic research with Beacon, told Bay Area News Group reporter George Avalos on Friday. "Corporate profits are high, capacity utilization is moving upward, which means more business investment. That will stimulate economic activity in the Bay Area, particularly in Santa Clara County and San Francisco."